How I Save Food and Minimize Waste

28 Nov, 2025

Americans love wasting food. You can take away our racism, our love of gun violence, our car addiction, our love of dictators, and our sense of superiority, but you will never take away our rotting bag of spinach that's been sitting in fridge for months that we forgot about and promised ourselves we’d eat but knew that we’d end up in this exact situation.

Look, I’m not one to throw stones. Buying food and throwing it in a closet or pantry and forgetting about it is so easy because it’s so cheap (relatively speaking) and readily available. I’ve never had to worry about when the next meal is coming or what I was going to eat in a given day, week, or month. They say the first step is recognizing that you have a problem, and I’ve climbed that mountain after years of not even realizing it was there.

So how am I getting better at not wasting food? There are a few ways. The first is that I buy more canned food. Canned food is never as good as fresh (with the possible exception of tomatoes), but it’s rarely inedible. Canned tuna is pretty bad, and canned potatoes are weird. But canned foods lasts for ages. Get a can of baked beans, some tomatoes, some lima beans, and it doesn’t matter when you get to it because they’ll stay good.

I don’t get rid of bean juice, either, or aquafaba, as it’s also known. I remember when I was a kid my mom always drained the liquid from canned beans, and then even washed them in water. I don’t know why she did that (she still does, and I still don’t). You can use this aquafaba as a substitute for egg whites or in making stocks.

Which brings me to the next thing I do, and my favorite—stocks. No one can touch these diamond hands, or whatever. Anytime I eat meat with bones in it, I save the bones. I buy chicken thighs with skin and bones on them, trim them when I got home, keeping the bones and skin for stock. Any bones will do, of course. Chicken wing bones, pork or beef rib bones, hammocks, you can even use fatty bacon. I wish I could use bananas, but I’ve been told they have no bones.

Yes, for all my sins I still eat meat. Fairly regularly, too. Almost every day. Like I said, I’m not perfect.

I do the same with vegetables. Potato skins, onion skins, tops and tails of carrots, apple skins even. Any scraps from vegetables can go in, and you never really know what it’s going to taste like because you’re always using different trimmings. I would caution against too many onion skins though, they can make it too bitter.

When you have your meat and/or vegetable stock, you can make all kinds of stuff. Being a weeb, I make a lot of ramen with it. You can also use it to make sauces, you can cook use meat stock to make fondant potatoes, you can cook rice with it, various soups and stews, and of course you can grab a straw and blow bubbles in it and call yourself Bubbly Johnson.

It’s all about getting the most out of your food, out of what you already have. If anything looks too bad to go into your stock, you can save scraps and bones and throw them in your garden as compost. If your bread gets stale, you can use it to make breadcrumbs. You can also do this with the ends of the loaf if you don’t like eating that part on its own. If you get one of those “I can’t believe it’s not bread!” loaves, those don’t really get stale before they go bad, so you can toast it in the oven to get it crispy and throw it in a blender or food processor.

Look up recipes for leftovers. You make too much rice for dinner? Idiot. But you can fridge it and make egg fried rice the next day. You can use leftover chicken soup as a basis for a casserole. You can blend up leftover veggies into a soup. Meat can make great sandwiches, of course. Turn that leftover grilled salmon into fish tacos. Put that ground extra burger patty on top of your ice cream and wonder what you’ve done with your life that led you to this point.

The best way to keep food from going bad is to have the right storage solutions. Air is the enemy; you want to choke the shit out of your food. Just kidding. In this context, the correct term is ‘strangle.’ Airtight containers are great for this. You can get one of those vacuum sealers, and I have one, but I don’t use it because its kind of a pain. Plus it requires plastic bags, which isn’t great. Simply use good containers that’ll last and put food in there. Flour, salt, sugar, pasta, rice, cheese, butter.

I find the best way to not waste food is to go to the source. Go to the grocery store with a plan of what dishes you’re going to make that week. I like to plan stuff I know will make good leftover dishes, to both save money and save the food. Have a list of what you want and don’t deviate from it. I don’t care if you think you might need that soy sauce, if it’s not on your list, don’t grab it. Put that frozen orange chicken down, when do you think you’re going to eat it? Pantry staples are also good, because a lot of it lasts forever, like rice, dry beans, pasta, flour. They’re all so versatile, too.

What’s so great about this effort to save food is that it’s also a pretty healthy way of eating. I’m not on a diet (you can attest to that if you’ve seen any of my videos), but I have lost some weight since I started doing all this. Or at least, I’m not gaining it so fast.

There are other ways to save in the kitchen. Those plastic bags cereal come in are great for a bunch of things. When I’m done with the cereal, I wash them out, and I can easily get three to five uses out of them. I try to reuse aluminum if it didn’t come into contact with the food or whatever it was covering. Best before dates are more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule—if it looks and smells okay, it’s probably fine to eat. Oh, here’s a great tip people always overlook: when you use a counter-top appliance, put a little bowl underneath the electrical socket to catch the excess electricity so you can use it again later. I like to sprinkle a little over top my ice cream.

There are a bunch of ways to reuse food, or of finding ways to prepare food before it goes bad. But in a developed country like the US, it is something to keep in mind. Do you really need to buy that? How can I get the most out of this ingredient? Will I eat all of this, or should I get a smaller pack? It won’t make you a saint, this is something we should have all been doing forever, but it will make you feel good. Yeah, I was struggling to write a good ending to this one.